A judge in Germany has put the brakes on Apple's complaint that Samsung copied its slide-to-unlock technology while awaiting the outcome of a separate lawsuit progressing elsewhere in the country.
The court in Mannheim announced it won't be doing any more legal stuff on the smartphone feature until proceedings in Munich have …

so everything that

Shades of the past resurface.

Those who have been around for a while will remember the Motorola flip-open-to-answer patent. To dodge it Nokia introduced the considerably less convenient slide-to-answer arrangement.

Now it's here we go again, and again.

It's time governments legislated to stop trivial patents, for in the long run they cost users/consumers considerable money not to mention inconvenience, waste of human time and effort, and of course, the lining of lawyers' pockets.

Right, I've already spotted the fault in my logic: the most predominant species in our governments are lawyers.

Apple to Patent Patents and sue everybody

Which point of patently obvious access method did the twit in the patent office miss.

The problem is that Rotten Core, Micro$haft, and lots of other "not into real R&D" outfits have been granted patents on stuff that quite frankly is blindingly obvious to any proffesional in that field (and hence not eligible for a patent)

e.g. patent for identifying contact information in a text message!

Sorry I was writing code to scrape adress details out of free text data back in the 80's using a command in the original version of COBOL code designed for such activity, and so was evey other coder when presented with the same business problem. But the US Prat office (sorry Patent Office), handed out a patent for this (obvious and easily id'd as prior art)

So what - Neonode had a slide-to-unlock long before Apple

Apple Watching?

It is interesting to note that on the Reg and elsewhere, that when anything slightly critical of apple is ever mentioned, the posts get down votes, but no reply saying why the voter disagreed with the post. (strange in that somebody disagreed enough to go to the effort of voting, but not point out why they think the post is wrong or misleading)

It's almost like apple paying a PR firm to monitor technology forums, and manage any negative publicity.

Re: Apple Watching?

Re: Apple Watching?

"Whenever any says anything positive about Apple it gets down votes without any explanation as well. You are paranoid."

Down votes without explanation for anything positive about apple, that sounds like sounds like reverse astroturfing by microsoft and google (hell, anybody that apple has managed to piss off in the IT world in the last 20 years,, so we'll just round it up to everybody's a suspect)

This could get dangerous for all of us

The EU doesn't support software patents and, at the moment, they are not enforceable here except in the narrow circumstance that the software is tied to the hardware. If this were to change, the EU would be at a severe disadvantage because it would then have to enforce US (and other) patents which have been building up for many years while EU citizens have none to protect because we've not been allow to make the claim.

On the face of it this is not going to change. No EU parliament or government is going sanction giving the US such a prize. But the courts might.

The 'swipe to unlock' feature is clearly just software. A phone does not *need* this feature to be locked or unlocked - a button or entering a number or pressing an on-screen button will do just as well. By contrast an engine management system *needs* software with specific characteristics to operate. However it seem these distinctions are not clearly in the minds of the judiciary when considering these case.

Or maybe these cases are being fought in Germany in the hope judges there may be more inclined to equate smarphone software with, say, a BMW engine management system. Maybe Mannheim is waiting on BMW's home town for just this reason.

The consequence of judges upholding Apple's claims could be profound. This would set a precedent that US software patents are enforceable in the EU. While this would take a while to play out, companies with deep pockets which also hold US patents could then start protesting their cases in EU courts.